‘I know; I was there,’ Owain whispered back.
‘I guessed it was you that stampeded the cattle.’
‘Regina—’ he was not really listening to her, ‘Regina, they were British, weren’t they? Not Saxon?’
‘They shouted to each other in our tongue. I know because I understood them.’
‘Yes, that’s what I thought. British gone wild, like dogs that run away to hunt in the woods.’ Owain felt clammily sick. To be here in the dark hiding from Saxon raiders was no more than physical danger; to be here hiding from one’s own kind, broken men turned wolf pack, was a hideous thing, an uncleanness like leprosy. ‘Don’t talk any more,’ he whispered. ‘We don’t know how sound carries under here, and anyhow I want to listen.’
But listening did not tell them much, here under the ground, and when once or twice they did catch a sound from the outside world it always came from the direction of the entrance hole, because that was the easiest point at which sound could enter. Once Dog whimpered, and Owain, his hand on the hound’s neck, felt the tremors running through his body, and wondered if danger was nearer than it seemed. But it did not feel quite like the quivering tension of the war-dog who smells the enemy; something else—another kind of uneasiness that he did not understand … At last, bidding Regina to stay where she was, he crept back towards the stoke-hole, Dog belly-slithering beside him. It was not easy to find the opening now, for dusk had deepened into night, and there was no gleam of paleness filtering through the debris until he was close upon it. But he found it again in a little, and crouched there, his hand on Dog’s collar, listening.
Far off, through the rain, he heard the intermittent lowing of a cow from the Forum, and that was all. The raiders must have given up the chase and returned to their fire and the cattle and whatever shelter there was to be found among the ruined Forum shops. Probably they would be gone at first light, for even though they had killed all the folk on the one farm it would not pay to linger on the way with raided cattle, and meanwhile, to hunt a girl through the streets was a thing that belonged to the hot blood of the moment; now that they had abandoned the hunt they would not return to it again. He drew a long breath of relief, but settled down to keep watch for a while, all the same.
It was some while later that he heard Regina calling him: ‘Owain!—Owain!’ in a whisper that seemed straining to burst free of her throat into the most dreadful scream.
7
The Olivewood Fire
‘WHAT is it? I’m coming,’ he whispered back. ‘I’m coming, Regina,’ and ducking round, he began to feel his way back with frantic haste, through the blackness towards where he had left her.
And all the while she kept up that little frozen call: ‘Owain! Owain!’ as though in that way she were clinging to him by a kind of life-line to save herself from some horror.
‘It is all right! Hold on, whatever it is. I’m coming—I’m almost there.’ He blundered into one of the hypocaust pillars, hurting his shoulder, scrabbled his way past it, and reaching out into the blackness that pressed against his eyeballs, found Regina’s skinny arm with the lank masses of her hair tumbling over it. ‘I’m here. Nobody’s hurting you. What is it?’
‘Make a light,’ she whispered. ‘A light—a light—!’ It was almost a wail.
Owain hesitated, but the flash of the strike-a-light could scarcely betray them down here, even if there was someone quite close by, and the horror in Regina’s voice could not be denied. He felt for the little leather bag at his belt, and fumbled out the flint and iron pyrites, a dry twig and the whisp of scorched grass he used for tinder. He got his first sparks quickly, and in the instant’s tiny glow before they went out, saw Regina crouched against the wall staring straight before her with wide terrified eyes, and almost touching her knee, the bones of a human foot—just the bones, with nothing over them. Then the sparks went out.
Regina made a dry sound in her throat. And Owain, with a sudden feeling of suffocation, heard his own voice, shaking. ‘Don’t be afraid, he can’t hurt you. I’m getting the light again.’ His fingers were working frantically at the strike-a-light, made clumsy by his desperate urgency; spark followed useless spark, but he got the tinder to catch at last, and dipped the dry twig into it. A little clear tongue of flame sprang up and in the uncertain gleam of light he saw the skeleton of a man huddled, half lying, into the angle of the wall. It was still partly covered by the rags of a fine woollen tunic, and clutched against it by the delicate fan of bones that was one hand, was a leather bag. It was a little open, and something had spilled out from it. Something that gleamed faintly on the floor; and holding the light lower, Owain saw a scatter of coins, thick-furred with dust, but still showing at their edges a thin rind of gold.
Ulpius Pudentius, the master of the house.
The twig was burning down to his fingers.
‘I want to go away,’ Regina was whispering. ‘I put out my hand in the dark and there he was. I want to go out of here.’
‘We can’t go out, not until those men are away,’ Owain told her. ‘We’ll get back towards the stoke-hole, but we can’t go further. There—isn’t any harm in him, not now.’
‘I wish I hadn’t brayed after him in the street,’ Regina said.
The flame burned his fingers and he dropped the twig. The darkness rushed in again as the tiny flame twisted and turned blue on the beaten earth floor, and guttered out. He reached out to where he knew Regina was, found her hand and pulled her towards him.
It seemed a very long way back to the stoke-hole, but they reached it at last and felt the wind clearly cold on their faces. The rain had stopped and the clouds parted, and one small white star looked down at them through the charred beams and the bramble sprays, which was somehow comforting. Owain put his arms round Regina and pulled her hard against him to stop her shaking. He wished he had his cloak to wrap round both of them. Dog lay warm and heavy across their feet, starting and twitching from time to time. There was no sound from the Forum.
The night took a long time to pass. Sometimes they dozed a little, huddled together, but never for more than a few moments at a time, and never deeply enough to forget where they were, nor what was in the darkness behind them. The rain came back, and then cleared again, and at last the chinks of sky overhead began to pale a little and turn ash-coloured. A willow wren twittered in the wild thickets of the garden. From the direction of the Forum a steer lowed, and then another. Dog pricked his ears.
‘They’re moving,’ Owain said. It was the first time either of them had spoken in all the long night that lay behind them. Regina raised her head to listen. At any rate she had stopped shaking.
Presently they heard the confused sounds of a cattle drove coming nearer, nearer yet. To the lowing of the cattle was added the pelter of hooves and the shouting of men. They were heading down the broad main street towards the West Gate. To Owain and Regina, crouching tense in their hiding place, the sounds seemed to leap upon them in a burst, as the raiders swept past the narrow entrance of the alley-way; and Dog growled deep in his throat. Then it was growing fainter again, fainter, dying away into the gusty morning. And at last it was gone altogether. The light was growing fast, and thrush and robin were answering the willow wren in the tangled gardens, as though all that had happened had been nothing but an evil dream.
Owain waited a while longer, to be quite sure; then he straightened his arms from round Regina. They were so stiff and numb that for a few moments they did not seem to belong to him at all, and nor did his legs when he drew them under him. ‘We can go now,’ he said. ‘Oh, but I’m stiff!’ It was queer how ordinary his voice sounded.
They crawled out from under the debris, and without anything said between them, Regina and Dog looking on, Owain set to pulling and heaving at the fallen tangle of charred wood, until with a slithering crash, it came down over the beam, closing the little dark entrance behind them. That would at least keep out wolf and wild dog from the poor bones inside. Then they went back
through the morning emptiness of Viroconium, through the Forum, where horse droppings and cattle dung and the great black scar of a fire was left to tell of the night that had passed, to the little store-room at the back of Kyndylan’s Palace.
As they came nearer along the broken colonnade, Owain felt Regina begin to hang back a little; he was walking slower himself, wondering what they would find when they got there. But when they reached the low doorway, and he ducked down the two steps after Regina, with Dog bounding ahead, they found everything just as it had been yesterday. Clearly the raiders had not chanced on their hideout at all. Owain stood looking round him, seeing his ragged cloak spread over the dry grass against the wall, and the storage place he had made for the corn with a few boards in one corner. The fire burned out to grey ash—they always kept the fire going when they could, smooring it with turves at night, just as any household did, because it took so long to get fresh fire with the strike-a-light—and the wood piled beside it for last evening’s cooking; the rosemary seedling with three pale flowers on it in its broken crock beside the door; the pair of raw-hide moccasins he had made for Regina from the skin of the roebuck, and which she never wore, for the soles of her feet were as hard as horn. The place smelled like an animal’s lair, but in an odd way it had been home.
‘The fire has gone out,’ Regina said.
‘We should have had to put it out anyway. If the Saxons came after the cattle it might betray us.’
‘There are no Saxons to come; they killed all the folk at the farm.’
‘There might be neighbours to avenge them.’
‘If they were coming, they would have been here before this,’ Regina said. She looked up at him pleadingly. ‘Let us make the fire, Owain. I’m so cold; I want the fire here—just once more.’
Owain glanced at her quickly, and away again. So she knew it, too, that this was the end, the time to go.
‘Please, just one more fire,’ said Regina.
He squatted down and reached for some dry sticks from the woodpile to make the framework of their last fire in Viroconium.
Presently he had it going, the warmth stealing out into the chill of the little dark chamber, and Regina, who had been moving about making what few preparations there were to make for a journey, brought the battered copper pot they cooked in, with water and a few handfuls of grain in it, and propped it over the flames. A hot mush was more sustaining, they had found, than the corn eaten dry, and unless they wished to go hunting for the lost pigeons, which probably the raiders had found anyway, they had nothing else to stay their stomachs with before they set out. The rest of the grain she had scooped into the deerskin bag that Owain had made at the same time as the moccasins. Then she huddled closer to the fire, her thin arms round her updrawn knees, creeping closer as though she would get right among the flames in her efforts to get warm. ‘He must have crawled under there because he felt too old to run,’ she said, ‘and so he died there all alone in the dark.’
‘Maybe the smoke smothered him,’ Owain said. It was better to think of the old man coughing out his life quickly, than lingering perhaps for days, under the ruins of his world, with only his useless gold to comfort him.
There was a long silence, and then Regina leaned forward to stir the unsavoury mush with a bit of wood to keep it from sticking. ‘Where shall we go?’ she asked.
Owain did not answer at once. He was thinking. But the strange thing was that he never for one moment thought of going back to Priscus and Priscilla. If he had found the remnants of a British host and marched out with them again to face the Saxon hordes, he might have gone back one day, if he had lived; even, perhaps, if the men last night had been Saxon raiders. But Britain was a lost land and a lost cause, the swords were rusted and the lights were out, and nothing seemed left to do but to get away and leave it to the dark.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps we could get across to Gaul—to Armorica.’
‘You told me once that that way cost gold,’ Regina said.
Owain nodded, and his hand went without his being aware of it to the little hard knot under the breast of his ragged tunic that was his father’s ring hanging there. But he knew that that could not buy a passage for even one of them, let alone three. Then slowly he looked up. ‘Regina—the old man’s bag of gold—I expect I could shift the beams over the stoke-hole, and get in again.’
‘No!’ Regina cried.
Owain did not like the idea himself, but still … ‘Why not? He does not want it any more.’
‘That is just it! If he was alive it would be different. I’d steal his last denarius, but—’ her voice broke into a little desperate wail. ‘It’s wicked, that gold. I’m afraid of it. If we take it, dreadful things will happen to us!’
He looked at her white strained face. ‘Very well,’ he said after a moment. ‘We’ll find another way.’
Silence again, until the water in the pot began to bubble, and Regina stirred the mush once more. Stirring still, she asked, ‘What will you do about Dog?’
He was startled. ‘About Dog?’
‘Even if you had the gold, no one would sell you a place for a dog in a fishing boat.’
He had not thought of that, and he was blankly silent.
‘Would you leave him behind?’ she pressed. It was as though she wanted to make sure that he would not hold their need of the gold against her, later on.
He looked down at Dog, who had crawled closer and lay with his head on his knee. He put his hand under the great hound’s neck, and felt the warm vulnerable place where the life beat below the chin. ‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘I would not leave him behind.’ Not for Dog, to be forsaken, to run to and fro searching for his Lord in a strange place until his heart broke and he knew that his Lord had betrayed him. ‘If—if it had to be like that, I’d kill him, myself.’ Dog gazed up at him with amber eyes, and thumped his tail, pleased because his Lord was taking notice of him; and Owain felt his throat swell, so that the words came gruffly. ‘But I don’t want to do that—I don’t want to do that, Regina.’
They stared at each other, both taken up with the problem. Then Regina said, ‘Maybe we could steal a boat? Just a little boat?’
‘If we did, how would we know how to manage it—or which way to go?’ But Owain answered his own questions almost in the same breath, his eyes brightening. ‘I have handled a coracle on the river at home—I wonder if a boat is very different. And they do say that round the south-easternmost part of Britain the sea is so narrow that you can see the coast of Gaul. If we could get across in the narrow part, we could maybe work our way back along the Gaulish coast. There must be woods to hunt there too—until we came to Armorica at last.’
It was a crazy plan, but they had no means of knowing how hopelessly crazy it was. Owain knew that to head south-eastward would be to head straight into Saxon country, but so long as they kept to the wilds, and had nothing to do with roads and settlements, they might get through all right.
‘That is what we must do then,’ Regina said, as though the thing were as simple as walking across Viroconium.
Owain nodded. ‘We’ll try, anyway.’
Presently the mush was cooked, and they took it off the fire and tipped a good dollop out on the floor for Dog, and then with the pot between them, ate what was left, scooping it out in alternate handfuls.
Regina had brought out the last of the olivewood that they had saved for some nameless special occasion, and set it on the fire. The oily blue flames sprang up pointed and delicate as flower petals; and when they had finished eating she fetched the rosemary seedling from its place beside the door, and tipping out the earth, smashed the crock to shards on one of the stones with which they had built their hearth, and dropped the seedling into the heart of the fire. Owain watched it twist and crisp and become for a moment a sprig of gold among the blue olivewood flames, and crumble into ash, while the aromatic scent of it stole out into the room like a farewell. He was not sure whether it was some kind of sacrifice, or just so tha
t there should be nothing left …
And he did not ask.
Anyway it was time to be going. He got up, making sure that his snares and his well-worn supple sling were in the breast of his tunic, and his knife and strike-a-light in his belt, and reached for the deerskin bag of grain. ‘We must go now, while there is still half the day left to start us on our way.’
Regina looked up from the bundle she had made with the rest of their few possessions in his cloak. ‘And before any more men come,’ she said.
But Owain, taking a last look round while she scattered a few last grains of barley for the birds, knew that that was not all the reason for their going. Raiders might come again, yes, or Saxons come after the raiders or raiding in their turn, and that was the sensible daylight reason, the surface reason. But under the surface in the dark lay last night’s discovery. And that was no good reason at all; yet they both knew that because of it, not because an old man had died in the ruins, but because of the manner of his dying, Viroconium was not a place to live in, any more.
The blue flames of the burning olivewood were sinking low, and soon the fire would be out.
‘Come, then,’ he said, whistled Dog to heel, and they walked out of the little room at the far end of Kyndylan’s Palace, without looking back, on their way to Gaul.
8
The Forest of Thorns